Cultural appropriation

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown Culture eating itself, yesterday In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Cultural appropriation
/ˈkʌlʧᵊrᵊl əˌprəʊprɪˈeɪʃᵊn/ (n.)
The inappropriate, problematic or unacknowledged adoption of elements of one culture by members of another. Some see it, we are told as an exploitative form of “cultural colonialism”.

In the neuroticist’s unending quest to find things to be upset about, the wilder-eyed of our number have taken up intellectual property, a cultural concept squarely rooted in the western intellectual tradition — yes, that western intellectual tradition: the one that colonised the planet and ruined the natural world — misunderstood and then misapplied it to cultural and linguistic situations in a way that makes no sense at all to anyone but — well, those paragons of the western intellectual tradition: the libtards.

For “cultural appropriation” itself is a brazen act of cultural appropriation, from the very western oppressors against whom the charge is usually levelled. It is even more ironic that this, of all western intellectual traditions, is the one to which critical theorists should hitch their wagon, since it was with the very idea of “property rights” that colonialists subjugated their foreign dominions in the first place.

The idea that cultural practices are the sorts of things that can be stolen is itself an artefact of colonial exploitation.

There is no monopoly on good ideas.

Well, there wasn’t, until some capitalists invented a way of asserting monopoly rights over good ideas and — ironically — forgot to copyright it.

It’s all about the memes, stupid

Now, even if you are minded to hoover up all the righteous, post-colonial angst — it seems to be the vogue right now — this preposterous idea is still a duffer, for it presumes that members of a culture own, or have some kind of moral right to control, their culture. This is to get things precisely backwards: we do not own our culture; our culture owns us. It will decide where it spreads. We are but vessels.

In the same way one can say it was not humans who domesticated wheat but vice versa, we should regard useful cultural artefacts as units of memetic transmission, replicating themselves wherever they can find a suitable host. We are those hosts. (It is a pity the internet, er, appropriated Richard Dawkins’ coinage the “meme”, for it captures this idea perfectly.)

The most resilient cultures are those whose memes replicate most freely, spreading their ideas into the brains of “aliens”, often displacing the cultural memes that were already there. That was pretty much what the colonials did. You know; colonising those brains with western ideas, like blankets, guns, governorship, property rights, denim, highway cops and cheeseburgers.

The real concern for a culture ought not to be when disrespectful aliens are borrowing its ideas, but in the opposite case: when its own members are becoming infected with new alien ideas, displacing those of its own. That a culture should have any interest in controlling intellectual property — thereby artificially restraining the free movement of its ideas — is the perverse western idea.

See also

• Libtard
• Evolution by natural selection